Feb/Mar 2010
Making Our Mark
Two scholars scrutinize Twain's last years as an American icon
Gary Indiana
Laura Trombley's Mark Twain's Other Woman and Michael Shelden's Mark Twain: Man in White are remarkably absent any close study of the literary works of Mark Twain, concerned as they are with the last decade or so in the life of a writer whose important books had been written very previously. Twain's major project between 1900 and 1910 was the burnishing of his public image; as his every sneeze, utterance, and physical movement from one location to another was clocked for posterity by the world press, typically in banner headlines, the historically ill informed could easily conclude that the period under scrutiny constituted an astonishingly slow news decade. Since the appearance of his last major work, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in 1889, Twain, or Samuel Clemens (journalists used his nom de plume
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